What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[J Harker]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Here you are.

Network Distributing Ltd Film TV Home Entertainment > Network Halloween Ten

I need to pick up The Door With Seven Locks (1940), The House in the Woods (1957), House of Darkness (1948) and Someone at the Door (1936) which i hopefully will in the next sale.

Right had a read. Few there I'm interested in. The House In The Woods in paricular. Black Limelight sounds interesting. Also The Door With Seven Locks and lighthouse film, can't remember the title.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by J Harker

Right had a read. Few there I'm interested in. The House In The Woods in paricular. Black Limelight sounds interesting. Also The Door With Seven Locks and lighthouse film, can't remember the title.

I got Black Limelight and Tower of Terror in the last sale and planned to watch them as part of Decemberdike. However i had others to watch and never got round to it...so they go towards this years Decemberdike fest.

[J Harker]

Bloody Decemberdike. You clearly have too much time on your hands Dem. I could watch a new film every night from now til December and i doubt I'd get on top of my to watch pile. 😂

[bizarre_eye@Cult Labs]

The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)



Ralph Burton is a miner who is trapped for several days as a result of a cave-in. When he finally manages to dig himself out, he realizes that all of mankind seems to have been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. He travels to New York City only to find it deserted. Making a life for himself there, he is flabbergasted to eventually find Sarah Crandall, who also managed to survive. Together, they form a close friendship until the arrival of Benson Thacker who has managed to pilot his small boat into the city's harbor. At this point the tensions rise between the three, particularly between Thacker, who is white and Burton, who is black.

A fairly refreshing and engaging post-apocalyptic tale with a stand-out performance from Harry Belafonte. More melodramatic than your usual end of the world fare in places but it dispenses with the usual token self-loathing. I've been meaning to check this one out for a few years now and I wasn't let down. Recommended.



75/100

[Buboven]

Some more recent watches, one of which was the other Death Walks... films in Arrow's new boxset. Thought this was better, it benefits from the feisty female protagonist being there for the whole film. Overall a really fun giallo with some bizarre touches.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Pajama Game (1957)

Reasonable musical starring Doris Day and John Raitt, about a pajama factory where the employees are demanding an extra 7 and a half cents pay per hour .

Bizarrely the best parts of the film and most lively song and dance routines seem detached from the film itself and appear to have been spawned in other productions including the forthcoming (maybe) Human Centipede musical. Sadly for Day she's usurped by Gene Kelly's former choreographer, Carol Haney who gets all the memorable routines.

God knows why i've posted this here. The Pajama Game is hardly Cult Labs material.

[J Harker]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

The Pajama Game (1957)

Reasonable musical starring Doris Day and John Raitt, about a pajama factory where the employees are demanding an extra 7 and a half cents pay per hour .

Bizarrely the best parts of the film and most lively song and dance routines seem detached from the film itself and appear to have been spawned in other productions including the forthcoming (maybe) Human Centipede musical. Sadly for Day she's usurped by Gene Kelly's former choreographer, Carol Haney who gets all the memorable routines.

God knows why i've posted this here. The Pajama Game is hardly Cult Labs material.

No sorry mate God doesn't know why you've posted this here. I had a chat with the big guy earlier and while he's apparently fairly open minded he's not sure why you're watching Doris bloody Day musicals but you can't accommodate Crimson Peak til December. 😂

[J Harker]

Death Race 2. I'd dismissed the sequels as cheap dtv tat but this is a surprisingly entertaining prequel to the Statham flick. Charts the imprisonment and then rise of getaway driver Carl Lucas who becomes Frankenstein from the original film. Unlike the first film the 'Death Race' of the title doesn't actually feature til well over halfway. In fact vehicle carnage isn't really the big deal here for most of the film. The prisoners are actually forced to fight in an arena gladiator style to begin with with the death race actually being invented later in the film. I enjoyed this one more than the original i think. Oh and the lovely Lauren Cohan is in it which is all the reason i needed really.

[bizarre_eye@Cult Labs]

Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917)



A writer bets a friend that he can write a 10,000-word novel in 24 hours. The friends takes the bet, and gives him the keys to his Baldpate Inn, which has been closed for the winter, so he can write in complete seclusion. Things start heating up, though, when a succession of people who also have keys to the inn begin showing up.

A rather ambitious endeavour to bring the classic and oft told tale to the screen back in 1917 and the end result is not entirely successful. This is mainly due to the silent nature of the film coupled with zero musical score meaning that often it is hard to become fully engaged with the events unfolding on screen. However, the short running time coupled with the enigmatic George M. Cohan certainly makes this a worthy watch, albeit a slightly flawed film overall.

A difficult one to rate, but I eventually settled on a solid, rounded 60/100

[Frankie Teardrop]

GOBLIN – For some the difference between shot-on-video movies and actual movies – real movies – is as stark and as primal as the difference between their own shit and someone else's. I'm into SOV, but even after all these years they still feel strange and awkward to me. Todd Sheets' 'Goblin' is a case in point, surely a film which would appear strange and awkward to virtually anyone. It's about a bunch of people in a house being murdered by a goblin. That's it. Oh, there are some zombies at the end. Structurally, it pretty much hits a 'people talk, people run around looking afraid, people die' rhythm early on, and simply repeats, repeats. Actually, this steady beat is broken up midway by a ten minute sequence of a guy looking round a house with a flashlight mumbling “umm, seriously guys... call the cops... call the cops...”. In a thousand years time, this scene may be known as the most important few minutes of cinematic history. I don't know why, but then I have no idea why films like 'Goblin' have such a hold on me. I suppose it's the ultra tawdriness, the harsh cheapness of early video, from the look of it all right down to the fumbling, half improvised half wooden acting, those textures that make you feel as if you're watching something from another planet. I do bang on about this stuff, but it's the wellspring of accidental surrealism. 'Goblin' is excessive on other levels too – there's the gore, real butchers shop stuff, basically offal in close up for what seems like an eternity. There's loads of it, loads. HG Lewis would puke. On the other hand, no. The way it's rendered here, it's as dramatic and as exciting as watching a settee, which only adds to the madness. Gore mongering metaller Sheets is an avowed Christian, so there's no sleaze, and I can't remember much profanity... it's all artificially wholesome. Apart from the bits where people have their guts ripped out, again and again. See 'Goblin'. It's like watching paint dry, only with the gradually dawning realisation that the paint is your own sanity slowly evaporating. Can be found on one of those Mill Creek type affairs.